Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [1]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 January. It will be on all wikis from 9 January (calendar).

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser use very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It can lead to downgrade attacks. Since 9 December you just see a warning. Soon the browser will not connect to the wikis at all. Most are users on Android systems older than 4.4. You can read the browser recommendations. [2]

Wikis can protect pages so that only some users can edit them. The standard protection levels are Allow only autoconfirmed users and Custodians and curators only. If your wiki use more protection levels the technical name might be renamed for standardisation. This doesn't affect what users see. [4]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 January. It will be on all wikis from 16 January (calendar).

Future changes

Deepcat and Catgraph will stop working. This will happen at the end of January. This is because you can now use the normal search function instead. [5]

You can use <ref follow="…"> to merge footnotes that follow each other. It is meant to be used for digitised books on Wikisource. If the order of the footnotes is wrong no error was shown but the bad <ref> was shown outside the <references /> list. This will change and you will see an error message instead. [6]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 January. It will be on all wikis from 23 January (calendar).

Future changes

There is a new suggestion for what to show when someone edits without registering an account. This is to give unregistered editors better privacy and make some anti-vandalism work go faster. You can give feedback.

Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will no longer support Python 2. Use the python2 tag if you need to continue running Python 2 scripts. The Pywikibot team strongly recommends to migrate to Python 3. You can get help to do so. [7]

The weekly MediaWiki branch cut will soon become automated. The timing for this cut may change. You can discuss in Phabricator if this affects you. [8]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

Some mobile diffs have problems. A couple of buttons are not shown. Structured data diffs on Commons are confusing. The developers are working on fixing it. [9][10]

Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions can't move discussion pages. This is a bug. The developers are working on fixing it. [11]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

There is JavaScript code on Special:Undelete for administrators that makes it possible to automatically select multiple checkboxes by holding the "Shift" key and clicking. This code is also loaded by accident on other special pages and on articles. This makes pages slower to load. This will be fixed. If you know of other special pages where this is useful please tell the developers at phab:T232688.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 February. It will be on all wikis from 6 February (calendar).

There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things. [13]

Changes later this week

The MediaWiki action API is used by various tools like bots and gadgets. Some error codes will change. Some parameter values that do not follow the standard will no longer work. [14]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 February. It will be on all wikis from 13 February (calendar).

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 February. It will be on all wikis from 20 February (calendar).

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (calendar).

Future changes

There will be a reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug. [17]

Changes later this week

If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. [18]

When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security. [19]

On Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to. [20]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (calendar).

There is a vote on the creation of a new user group called abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.

wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a list. [22]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

There is a new search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon. [23][24][25]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (calendar).

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

There is a new API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the documentation on mediawiki.org. [27]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (calendar).

Future changes

If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface. [28][29]

There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed. [30][31]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (calendar).

Future changes

There is a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

There was a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed. [35]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 April. It will be on all wikis from 9 April (calendar).

Future changes

MediaWiki will use a newer version of Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to. [36]

There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest. [41][42][43]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 15. It will be on all wikis from April 16 (calendar).

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 4 May 2020.

Recent changes

The small wiki toolkits is to help smaller wikis that need technical skills. They can learn and share technical skills. [45]

Over-qualified CSS selectors in Wikimedia skins have been removed. div#content is now .mw-body. div.portal is now .portal. div#footer is now #footer. This is so the skins can use HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them. [46]

Changes later this week

There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011. [47]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 April next week. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 April next week. It will be on all wikis from 30 April next week (calendar).

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [49]

Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [50]

Changes later this week

You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages. [51]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (calendar).

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. [57][58]

Problems

There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with iOS 13 and Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can report them. [59]

Graphs will be rendered in the reader's browser. This will use Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files. [63]

Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use HTML5. [64]

Some CSS for the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. See how.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

There is a new beta version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos. [66]

Problems

There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May. [67][68][69]

The Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed. [70]

Changes later this week

You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get. [71]

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (calendar).